Artificial foliage is traditionally manufactured using a silkscreen or heat transfer process to transfer a two-dimensional image of a flower petal or leaf onto a medium such as fabric, paper or other material. The image may be drawn by hand or can be produced in a digital image format.
To create the foliage, the same image is transferred to multiple locations on the medium and the silkscreen process may be repeated several times to add different colors at each location.
The transferred images are then cut out of the medium and are often hand-painted with accent colors and lines.
In order to impart a realistic shape to foliage, such as a petal or leaf, the cut images are placed in a mold and heated to form a three-dimensional contour.
The process continues with the addition of plastic veins or support wires to the back of the petal or leaf and the resultant parts are combined to form a flower or foliage.
A variety of coatings may also be added to the flower or foliage to create a natural texture, provide fragrance and preserve the final product.
The use of a silkscreen or heat transfer process to create a realistic representation of natural foliage has a number of limitations.
In a silkscreen process, the image of the top surface of a leaf, for example, is transferred to the top surface of a material. When the transferred image is cut out of the material, the top and bottom surfaces of the leaf are essentially identical in composition. The top and bottom surfaces of a natural leaf, however, do not have the same composition.
In addition, colors applied to the top surface of the material during the silkscreen process tend to bleed through to the bottom surface of the material, creating a bottom surface color that is not representative of the bottom surface color of a natural leaf. Further, the multiple templates used for different colors in a silkscreen process may be misaligned and tend to produce unrealistic variations in color density in the material.
In a typical heat transfer process, a four-color image of the top surface of a leaf is initially transferred to a heat-sensitive film that is subsequently placed on the top surface of a material and heated to transfer the image to the material. A bottom surface image of the leaf may be similarly transferred to another location on the top surface of the material. The top surface and bottom surface image pieces are then cut out of the material and pasted together. As such, it takes two layers of material to create a leaf or petal resulting in an unrealistic representation of a natural leaf.
Accordingly, it is very difficult to represent a natural leaf or flower petal in both composition and color using traditional silkscreen or heat transfer methods.
The process of the present invention substantially departs from traditional methods used to manufacture artificial flowers and provides a unique direct print process to create a realistic representation of a natural flower or foliage on a medium.